Amazon, Apple deliver new shopping apps

While most folks love how convenient shopping can be on the Web, I suspect they also think it’s something of a curse. It’s so easy to make purchases that you can easily spend a lot more than you planned. Hey, just point and click! It doesn’t really feel like you’re spending money, does it?

Well, if you think the Web is a shopping-addiction enabler, wait until you start doing the same thing via apps on smartphones. Want to order that powerhouse 17-inch notebook you’ve been jonesing for? Go ahead and do it while you wait at the next stoplight . . .

Amazon and Apple on Tuesday released apps that are state-of-the-art examples of great shopping apps. Amazon’s Windowshop is brand new app, while the Apple Store app is a significant upgrade an existing one.

Windowshop is designed specifically for the iPad. Amazon already had an excellent iPhone app that worked on the iPad, but this takes advantage of the tablet’s expansive screen real estate.

Windowshop lets you browse Amazon’s vast collection of goods visually. When you first launch the app, you’re taken to a screen that shows the sites’ most popular categories in a horizontally scrolling ribbon across the top. Below each category is a column of products, which you can scroll vertically.

If you tap on any of the top-level categories, you’re taken to a screen that shows you products in a similar layout, arranged by subcategories. You can continue to drill down if there are further subcategories.

Or, if you’d rather not do all that tapping, you can go directly to a particular subcategory from the Browse button at the top of the screen.

Tapping on any product takes you to a popup screen with photos, details, Amazon user reviews and related items. If there are options for a product, you’ll have to choose those before the app will show you the actual price.

You can buy almost anything that’s available on Amazon’s traditional Web site on the Windowshop app, but there’s one glaring exception. Because of Apple’s restrictions, you can’t buy Kindle books, which would be readable on the Kindle iPad app. Instead, the product screen takes you to the iPad’s Safari browser to buy the book. Bummer.

The app is very well designed, and I enjoyed browsing visually. But those who are in a hurry may not want to wade through all these categories. I found searching to be a much faster way to find what I want, just as it is on Amazon’s Web site.

The Apple Store app is an attempt to integrate the online and brick-and-mortar shopping experience. You can now use it to reserve products for pickup or make appointments for Genius Bar service or in-store workshops . . . and then use it to tell the store’s staff that you’ve arrived.

When you first launch the app, which is designed for iPhone (but works on the iPad), it shows you featured products, just like the Web storefront. You can then drill down to specific products as needed.

The most interesting aspect is how the app works with Apple’s retail stores. You can designate a favorite store, and make a variety of reservations. You can even reserve some products for pickup, though these are only "holds" – you can’t buy something in the app. You’ll have to pay once you arrive at the store.

Not all products are available to be reserved, depending on the store. For example, on Tuesday afternoon, you couldn’t reserve an iPod Nano at the Memorial City Mall store. If you wanted to reserve one of the new MacBook Airs, only the top-of-the-line, $1,599 MacBook Air model was available at Memorial City. You may be able to use this app to determine availability of products at specific stores.

Once you arrive, you can use the app to check in and tell the staff you’ve arrived for your appointment.

The store employees have an app of their own, called Concierge, and they’re notified on their iPhones that you’ve arrived. I haven’t tested this system, but it seems pretty cool. I need to find an excuse to visit an Apple Store . . .

I found one recurring problem in the Apple Store app. Every time I launch it, I am told that "Some products in your cart were not available in the quantities specified," and that the number is being updated. However, when I look in my cart, it’s empty.

Both of these apps show the future of online and brick-and-mortar retailing. The two will blend more easily thanks to mobile device. And, unfortunately, you’ll probably end up spending a lot more money as a result! It’s just too easy.

Dwight Silverman | Techblogger, social media manager

5 Responses

Not being able to buy Kindle books from the Amazon app (or better yet, from the Kindle app) is seriously annoying. On the other hand, having to buy books from Apple’s iBook app is even more annoying, and the app is less usable, so advantage amazon, I think.

Initially, I didn’t think Windowshop would be a problem in landscape-only, given that it helps to see a lot of columns across the screen at once. But where portrait mode would be better is where you’ve zeroed in on a category, and want to see more of the products in the columns under that category. I drilled down to DDR3 1066-MHz SODIMM computer memory, as I’m thinking about going to 8 GB in my MacBook Pro. At that point, I had only one column on the left, and a bunch of wasted space on the right. At that point, yeah, I wanted to go to portrait mode.

It just seems a bit lazy. I don’t like an app that makes me change the way I’m holding the iPad, unless there’s some really compelling reason it has to work that way, and I use it in portrait mode 95% of the time.